David Bevan

October 4, 2012 –
He found it. Flat on his belly, his tiny feet fluttering beneath the couch in his father's skylit home studio, Rory Mascis, four years old and three feet tall, is stretching to retrieve a miniature guitar. "Do you want to hear some songs?" he asks, his long brown hair alive with static as he stands. "Lou and I are going to play some songs."By "Lou," he means Lou Barlow: bassist, bandmate, friend, and foil to his father, Dinosaur Jr. frontman Joseph "J" Mascis Jr. At the moment, Barlow is downstairs in the living room with an acoustic guitar, waiting alone beside a small amp that he’s readied for Rory's baby Les Paul. It's a dreary May afternoon and Mascis' Amherst, Massachusetts, home is playing host to the Dinosaur Jr.

October 3, 2012 –
Add directing to that ever-growing list of vocations into which Chicago new bluesman Willis Earl Beal channels his myriad creative energies. Though the recent Breaking Out (and SPIN Essentials) alum has passed around his novels just as quietly and liberally as he has his home recordings, this month will see the web premiere of Principles of a Protagonist, a self-directed short film based on his novella of the same name, set to a host of re-configured, re-recorded songs he plans to release for free in EP form with some help from BitTorrent. Below, hear "Cosmic Queries," a tinny, relatively claustrophobic Acousmatic Sorcery highlight that's been rendered both operatic and cathedral-ready in its newly imagined form.

October 3, 2012 –
Buffalo native Kyle J. Reigle describes the elegiac, blood-freezing folk of his Cemeteries project as "goth pop," a genre tag that feels a bit too cheerful once you've heard it. His forthcoming full-length, The Wilderness, due later this month via Lefse, was recorded at home but sounds like it came from the crypt, as evidenced by the spare and spectral, intermittently sylvan tones of "Summer Smoke," a song that's been given the beautiful, Nolan Wilson Goff-directed video accompaniment below.

October 1, 2012 –
In a few weeks, Those Darlins will embark on what they've lovingly named the "Summer's Dead Tour," a three-week trek across North America alongside fellow Nashvillian punks Heavy Cream that takes its name from a song the threesome recently wrote and recorded for a split 7" single with said tourmates, to be pressed by their respective labels (Oh Wow Dang and Infinity Cat) and sold on said tour. (The B-Side, Heavy Cream's "Prison Shanks," was produced by San Franciscan garage-punk cyclone Ty Segall). But "Summer's Dead," a song they're calling their "spin on the Canadian-American murder ballad," was inspired by a "a chef-cum-seductor-cum-body dissector who stayed at the Royal Albert Arms Hotel in Winnipeg," a venue the band recently played with King Khan.

October 1, 2012 –
The past few years have seen Dr. Dog gradually transition away from their scruffy, lo-fi beginnings towards a sound far more symphonic — growth that could be heard most impressively in this year's Be the Void, their second full-length for Anti-. Tomorrow, the rootsy, Philadelphian pop neo-classicists will release their Wild Race EP, five songs whose jingle jangle sounds and feels every bit as engrossing as its excellent predecessor, if not more so. Hear them for the very first time below:

October 1, 2012 –
Last week, we shared a stream of PAWS' "Sore Tummy" single, a thick, rhinocerous-like hunk of that which populates the Glaswegian outfit's (and Best 5 New Artists alums) entire full-length debut, Cokefloat: Scottish post-punk and twee, as heard and amplified devotees of those early, wondrous Foo Fighters records. Below, you can stream said debut in all its sore-throated, sabre-toothed glory — it's a record we suspect you'll be feeling weeks and months after the very first time you hear it.

September 28, 2012 –
Ty Segall has been known to relish covers. There is his excellent take on T. Rex's "Fist Hear Might Dawn Heart" and forthcoming reimagining of the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale." He's also known for his live renditions of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," AC/DC's "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap," and, most recently, more than just a few seconds of Lynyrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" during a rain-splashed set in Brooklyn last weekend. Now you can add Brian Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" to that list, Segall having teamed up with Dillon Watson of D. Watusi (a Nashville garage-rock crew comprised of Third Man Records employees) for an expectedly indigestive take on the highlight from Eno's 1974 classic Here Come The Warm Jets, a B-Side to a collaborative 7" single with Useless Eaters' Seth Sutton on Dead Records. Hear it below, via Chicago Reader.

September 27, 2012 –
Who: Nude Beach are Ryan Naideau, Chuck Betz, and Jimmy Shelton, three All-American boys who grew up playing in All-American punk bands together on Long Island's North Shore, only to find themselves thirsting to do more of the same once they all landed (separately) in Brooklyn years later. "This band was just a really fun way to get together on the weekends and get drunk and play music," says Naideau, 25, who also played a pivotal role in giving his power trio their moniker when they officially started up in 2008. "We were sitting together at a [non-nude] beach at the end of the street where my parents live [in Northport, New York], coming up with all sorts of stupid names. I wanted to call the band Beach Boys because I thought that was a funny re-appropriation. But, it was a little too close to home, and a little too stupid. We've never all gone to a nude beach together.

September 26, 2012 –
To record Circles, their forthcoming third LP, Moon Duo retired to Blue River, a Colorado mountain town of just 685 inhabitants southwest of Denver. They spent last winter there in isolation, working on what's arguably the Suicide and Silver Apples-referencing San Francisco duo's most accessible offering yet, a sumptuous, resplendent slab of psychedelia that — unlike its excellent predecessors — allows for a host of colors and textures with which they'd yet to experiment. Stream it in its entirety below.Moon Duo Tour Dates: September 26 - Lawrence, KS @ Replay Lounge September 27 - St.

September 26, 2012 –
This past summer, Brooklyn's Sea Monsters celebrated our nation's birthday on Martha's Vinyard as part of Neon Gold's second annual Stars + Stripes Festival. In addition to spending the holiday on a bill with both Grouplove and Detroit pop enchantress Alex Winston, the trio also took to the water and beach, as chronicled in this Will Welles-directed clip for appropriately titled, Replacements-informed new cut "Weekend Forever." See and hear it exclusively for the first time below.